Release Date: December 13, 2002
Starring: Pierce Brosnan, Julianna Margulies, Aidan Quinn, Stephen Rea, Alan Bates, Sophie Vavasseur
Directed by: Bruce Beresford
Written by: Paul Pender
Distributed by: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
MPAA Rating: PG (thematic material, language)
There are two great struggles in Evelyn. One of them, obviously, is the film’s story, which is about an Irish house-painter who fights to regain legal custody of his three children after they are named wards of the state. The other is about the film’s director, Bruce Beresford, who has quite clearly striven to show a compelling tale of heartfelt emotion without resorting to the usual Hollywood grandstanding and button-pushing. He succeeds on most counts, and his movie is a plain, compassionate service to its true-story source material.
The father, Desmond Doyle, is played by Pierce Brosnan, whose presence here is another considerable obstacle in the film. This represents the actor’s first serious effort to distance himself from the notoriously career-defining role of James Bond (a mantle he took up in 1995), and his genuine performance in Evelyn does as much to ensure there will be life after Bond for the actor than all of his other substantial non-007 films (like Dante’s Peak, The Thomas Crown Affair, and The Tailor of Panama) combined.
Like Brosnan’s performance, Evelyn comes from the heart, and the story, which takes place in 1950’s Dublin, is uplifting and heart-wrenching by turns. Devastated by his wife’s sudden abandonment on the day after Christmas and frustrated at the lack of job opportunities for a painter and decorator such as himself, Doyle sinks into a drunken despair with only his father to comfort him. When the authorities catch wind of the situation, however, they remove Doyle’s three young children -- brothers Dermot (Niall Beagen) and Maurice (Hugh McDonagh) and their older sister, 9-year-old Evelyn (Sophie Vavasseur) -- and put them in the care of the Catholic Church, until such time as Desmond finds a means of providing for his family, or the children’s 16th birthdays.
Or so it should have gone, anyway, but after Desmond secures gainful employment and straightens his life out, a number of forces conspire to keep his children out of his hands. This leads him to call upon the services of a group of lawyers (a dignified Stephen Rea at first, and then later also the elegant Aidan Quinn and the rotund Alan Bates) to examine the Family Act of 1941, the Irish law at the roots of Desmond’s troubles, and take their claim to the highest court in the land.
Surprisingly, much of the movie’s focus is on Desmond’s legal battle (which, in its gradual accumulation of sentimental lawyers, resembles the progression of things in Steven Spielberg’s Amistad -- in both films, two optimistic and energetic younger attorneys must convince an elder statesman and onetime national hero to lend his expertise to the case), so the movie’s title is slightly misleading. Evelyn, played by the gifted Vavasseur, has enough honest charm to fill up an entire movie, but she’s hardly the center of attention.
Nevertheless, she’s the driving force of her father’s ambitions, and it’s with this in mind that the movie goes about creating some villains -- in many cases, the steely-eyed nuns at the orphanage where she was kept under the provisions of the Family Act -- to make the situation even more imperative. Director Beresford (Double Jeopardy) clearly was at a loss as to how to present these characters: On one hand, they’re not truly villainous, for the nuns believe it to be their God-given duty to raise their charges in the proper manner, and if that means a slap on the wrists (or worse) from time to time, then so be it. On the other hand, to a 9-year-old girl, such nuns can appear exactly as the cruel, unforgiving witches the movie shows them to be.
The movie’s other villain, a curmudgeonly Supreme Court justice, is far more arbitrary, and seems only to exist for the sake of generating some of the Hollywood drama that director Berefsord eschews throughout most of the picture.
Most of the rest of the picture is free of these kinds of contrivances, though. The climactic court trial, while without the grandstanding that is resplendent in most American studio-produced films -- there are no grandiose speeches in which the speaker appears to be bathed in sunlight while the rest of the courtroom is silent enough to hear the proverbial pin drop -- at the same time lacks the gravity that a notable star could have brought to the movie in a small supporting role. As the veteran lawyer, the charming but somewhat bland Alan Bates could have easily been replaced with perhaps Timothy Dalton or Anthony Hopkins, who, in Bates’s smallish role, might have added a fiery spark in contrast to the movie’s otherwise damp aesthetic.
But the movie’s battle of good versus evil is already lopsided enough. Not only does Desmond have a small army of lawyers, he also has the eye of a pretty barmaid (Julianna Marguiles, whose Irish accent needs some work, but who has the good fortune of playing one of only two benevolent woman in the entire cast) and a case so unquestionably wholesome that the state does not appear contemptible for their stubbornness; it appears simply ridiculous. Nevertheless, there is something fundamentally criminal about keeping children apart from their parents, which means that the finale is sure to have audience members in tears regardless of the rest of the film.
The movie, directed by the Australian Beresford, is unabashedly sentimental -- everything seems to have been shot in soft light, and Stephen Endelman’s droopy score is ubiquitous -- but fortunately it’s the not the sort of emoting where the viewer is expected to feel sorry for one of the characters. Brosnan, for instance, plays Desmond Doyle as a conflicted and tortured individual with more than his share of vices, but at the same time, Doyle is a much kinder individual than Brosnan’s James Bond. Evelyn is a good reason to believe that the actor’s skills extend beyond sipping vodka martinis (though he does get to consume his share of alcohol in this movie). This movie is also a good reason to believe that not every tearjerker at the movies has to be about someone dying or love coming to a tragic finish -- a happy ending like Evelyn’s tops them all.
all contents © 2002 Craig Roush